I'm sure there are people smarter than me with more interesting things to say about CS4, but I put my 90 hours in and I'm going to talk about them

This game is incredibly mid for Kiseki standards. That's not to say it's bad, or that it doesn't have some incredibly good scenes, but the amount of things I had to play through to get there wasn't worth it. This game does not respect your time; that's not new to this series, but it feels especially prevalent with this game.

Let's start with the magic stuff. The Trails series has always had a common theme of political intrigue weaving itself with fantasy elements, all the way back to FC. I think this is what makes The Curse so disappointing; the series has shown that it's capable of writing this combination in fascinating ways without diminishing from either side, but CS4 drops the ball so hard despite The Curse being fairly interesting on a conceptual level. CS4's plot, in theory, centers heavily around an imminent, massive war. Better yet, the war is taking place across most of Zemuria, so it's touching a bunch of locations that 10 games have been getting us attached to. This is a perfect recipe for some high emotional stakes for your finale. The magic side of the plot cancels a lot of this out; the plot isn't actually about the war, it's about the rivalries. For every good sidequest about someone coming to terms with the war, there are two or three about The Curse causing a problem for you to solve.
Unlike the rest of the series, the party is now well aware of magic. No more secret clan of witches, no more mystery behind the schemes the villains are making. You start the game in Eryn Village and the party's motivation lies not in politically based action but in magically based action. For me, this makes it a lot harder to be invested, because frankly, the realm of magic is the realm of bullshit. Writers can make whatever the fuck they want happen with magic, and the worldbuilding around the magic isn't really strong enough for it to feel like something I can study or make predictions about. This isn't something that really bothered me in the past because magic was always a background thing, but in this game it's at the forefront and therefore causes a significant tonal shift from "story about people trying to get through political events" to "story about people doing whatever the magic makes them do". This is an exaggeration, but it's still a noticeable change that I dislike.

Let's talk about villains. Osborne, who I love for being an amazing villain, got a lot out of the ending. I think "guy who became the world's greatest enemy with the specific goal of bringing the evil into himself and sacrificing himself to destroy it" is raw as fuck. I kneel. It's especially cool when you start bringing in Rean foils with his own self sacrifice. The other villains in the game are kinda just there. This goes into my 2nd big complaint with the game; the writers are terrified of making characters evil. Almost everyone here is an apologist, or has a secret agenda, or is being controlled by the curse. THIS IS A STORY ABOUT WAR. I'm not saying there are no exceptions to this, but a vast majority of the people you fight are portrayed as if they aren't even villains. Act 2 is especially awful for this, with a majority of its fights being against people who are either only testing you or are just feeling so guilty about it uwu you should feel bad for them. (fuck claire) On a more civilian level, the game can't even handle making evil minor NPCs. Anyone who says something slightly too patriotic, does something just a little too evil, the party has to lament about how this is the curse. This is literally just not realistic. If you want to write an anti-war story, you are making yourself look outright childish if you refuse to portray how all of the people committing evil, inhumane acts are just as human as the rest of us. As is, CS4 refuses to hold the anyone responsible for the war. Even at the end, the only person arrested is Rufus Albarea, who voluntarily did so for political reasons as if taking the punishment for your crimes is some selfless act. This is maybe the most cowardly thing you could do when writing a story about war. I'm truly impressed.

Let's talk about the video game. CS4 combat is well and truly broken. CS3 was actually balanced on nightmare mode, like it felt like the game was encouraging you to break it just so that you could survive. CS4 gives up. I was able to break this game in half, and I was doing the bare minimum in party equipment/orbment management. I would be fighting Arianrhod, a character in this series renowned for her strength, and she melts like butter against my evasion tank. Also, having 20+ party members is a daunting task, but it didn't bother me that much cause I just focused on a small cast of the chars that I like.

In summary, this game feels like a perfect summary of the Cold Steel arc. Awful pacing, broken combat, questionable romance, and a few excellent moments and characters that make it hard to completely disparage the experience.

Wish I could say I liked this more after the decade long wait.

Pikmin has always been a unique series. Put on the gamecube, a console known for its creative choices, Pikmin was a cutesy RTS game with AI that was too bad to ever be dependable. It was a weird game, that was deceptively unforgiving in its difficulty. Pikmin 2 came out on the same console with several new decisions made, and overall being a significantly more difficult game. A lot of time passed before Pikmin 3 came out, but it was perfect when it did. Each of these games felt unique from each other, like they were all trying to both build off of each other while still adding its own things, and always having a certain feeling to their gameplay that made it feel like they were only designed for people who actually enjoyed doing difficult, on the fly strategy under a timer.

Pikmin 4 attempts to be a love letter to the series, in that it constantly brings in elements from all of the other games in a way that makes it feel like some sort of anniversary game or victory lap. However, Pikmin 4 also makes a lot of choices that felt antithetical to Pikmin's unique feeling as a series. Frankly, it streamlined everything. It sanded off all the edges. I barely had any deaths in the course of a full playthrough. Oatchi trivializes combat, features like Idler's Alert minimize the amount of effort you have to put into Pikmin management, and the in-game time rewind mechanic takes almost all of the danger out of the atmosphere. I hate to use buzzwords, but they took out the soul and try to appeal to nostalgia to make you fill in the gaps. As an example of this, after the initial shock of seeing the Water Wraith appear, I was disappointed after it failed to actually kill a single one of my Pikmin. Not to say that it doesn't provide any new content, I found the night missions mildly entertaining if nothing else, but it doesn't feel like much.

The game also feels very handholdy in general. You can't go a single day without having some NPC give you a text alert for something that Pikmin 2 would've just let you suffer through. You have a quest log and a skill tree, for some reason. You can purchase upgrades for yourself, some of which are completely game changing and all of which would've just been available from the start if it were any other game in the series. It feels like pointless padding, pointless extra menuing because for some reason Nintendo felt like they needed to add additional rewards to encourage you to actually engage with the game's optional content. A lot of the game's design decisions feel very corporate, where originally the series felt anything but.

To sum things up: this is the first time I've chosen not to 100% a Pikmin game out of sheer boredom.

I thought I'd been spoiled going in by knowing it was a trans-focused game, but the end revealing that she was still male-presenting in real life was an incredibly good writing choice. I'm just an ally, but I thought it did a pretty good job with the trans themes, aside from a small hangup with the self harm aspect. A part of me is in genuine disbelief that Swery made this.
Gameplay wise, it could be better. It falls for a lot of the pitfalls in this type of puzzle platformer game, where it takes longer than usual to actually solve the puzzle once you've seen the solution because of all the movement you have to do. It's not helped by this game's unique self harm mechanic, which I am again rather conflicted on. I think the puzzles involving it are usually creative, but 1. it slows down gameplay, 2. kinda feels like misery porn sometimes? and 3. feels.... weird in conjunction with the rest of the game's themes. These are all ultimately minor hangups, which combined only manage to drop the game from a 5 to a 4.5. As for other parts of the gameplay, I like the extra donut puzzles and the text messages that come with them. I think the texts are a really good way of 1. breaking up pacing and 2. just characterizing JJ and her situation in general. They were a key part of my enjoyment of the game all throughout.

Great game overall. I could easily see this resonating strongly with people both in and out of the trans community.